Finance

A while ago I wrote a post on how standard methods of valuing business opportunities hindered innovation. Somewhat foolishly I called it “How Accountants Kill Innovation” and it received a lot of comment from our blog readers, which was mostly very positive. Deb Schofield pointed out the uses of alternative valuation methods in her work as a VC and Ralph ...

This isn’t going to be one of those rants against ‘beancounters’. We have actually collected and analyzed data which tells us that traditional accounting and valuation methods will damage innovation performance. To be fair to my accounting colleagues (some of my best friends are accountants) the main conclusion from our study is that we need a different type of accounting ...

Few brands were hit as hard by the recession as Harley-Davidson. Demand for motorcycles has taken a hit, and demand for premium motorcycles has taken an even bigger hit. It’s hard to sell a lot of twenty-some-thousand-dollar bikes when discretionary income is at a premium. Harley’s revenues continue to suffer, dipping 7.7 percent in the third quarter. Under these circumstances, ...

Can it work? by Stefan Lindegaard I ask whether CFO’s can make innovation happen, but in reality this should not even be a question of whether it can be done but rather a question of how to do it. The reason for turning this a how-to question is the increasing role of the CFO in many companies. Their influence keeps ...

When will Apple have more revenues than Microsoft? How about later this year? by Adam Hartung Many of us remember the first Apple vs. Microsoft battle. Apple pioneered much of the personal computer business, and led the innovation curve for years with its implementation of the mouse and on-screen graphics. But eventually Microsoft successfully copied the innovations with Windows, and ...

For literally decades, the notion of return on investment, or even more specifically return on invested capital (R.O.I. either way) was the gold standard for justifying a business decision. If the return exceeded the investment enough (also weighing risk, disruption, and many other factors) then it would get the green light for funding. This was, and is, especially common in ...

I was intrigued when I read on the Harvard Business Review web site “Do we celebrate the wrong CEOs?” The article quickly pointed out that many of the best known CEOs – and often named as most respected – didn’t come close to making the list of the top 100 best performing CEOs. Some of those on Barron’s list of ...

by Hutch Carpenter At the Open Innovation Summit last week in Orlando, there were a number of companies there discussing their various initiatives for open innovation. What is open innovation? UC Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough, perhaps the father of the movement, formulated this definition several years ago: “Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use ...

“Build it and they will come.” We hear that mantra a lot. But with innovation, it is often more like, “Solve a pain and they will come.” The ultimate success of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) is a great example of this. The other night I was having dinner with someone who in the mid-1970’s worked with Citibank, the second ...

Jason Zweig writes the Intelligent Investor column for the Wall Street Journal. His recent contribution oddly echoed a query I received the prior Thursday during a speaking engagement in New York. Referencing the ‘Loss of Nerve’ principle in “When Growth Stalls”, my questioner wanted to know if it was prudent to conserve all the cash he could during the economic ...